Aleksander Doba paddled across the Atlantic recently, at the age of 70—for the third time. Apparently, the old fella has an ability like Rumpelstiltskin’s straw–into-gold trick whereby he spins suffering into, if not pleasure, then certitude or determination to feel alive and to keep going. A freakish outlier in the demographic where the natural tendency is to do less gnarly stuff the older we get, Doba operates by his own agenda. He once said: ‘If you aren’t willing to suffer, you can do nothing. You can sit and die. This is the only one thing you can do.”

The seas were glassy reflecting a rolling blue sky as the big Yamaha 250 horse motor slowed in approach to a string of timbered islets a mile off the rocky coast of Vancouver Island. I was happy to be back. Richard Leo had motored the big punt out from Rugged Point Lodge to meet us in a deep inlet and run us up coast. As we approached the offshore islands, he fired up the kicker and we slipped through the reefs and beds of kelp swaying in the cold green currents. When we reached the shallows, Steve and I slipped over the side like aging commandos to schlep kayaks, motors, solar panels and piles of gear ashore onto a fine, sandy beach.

We spent an hour hauling gear into camp, setting up a kitchen and pitching tents. By the time we finished the sun was on the descent and we had yet to catch dinner. We suited up and rigged up our rods and installed the little electric motors in our kayaks.

It was our first time in the new German engineered Wilderness System Helix MD kayaks. We pushed them into the water, found our GPS satellites and paddled out through kelp and rocks into open water where I tapped the throttle forward, heard the whine of the electric motor kick in and nosed ahead ever so slightly. Wow.

When I pushed the throttle ahead as far as it would go I shot through the water like a torpedo! After so many years and miles of paddling, motoring was an extraordinary feeling. Not at all sure what I thought about it, I cruised blithely to the outlying reefs where the ling cod swam thick and set to finding dinner.

We squeaked through narrow channels between rocks and breakers. The swell rolled into Ouokinsh Inlet like a queue of semis as we climbed over the front slope and skated down the back. The reef ahead took the full-on brunt of the NorPac surge. It sounded like cannon fire. Sprays of white orchids filled the air.

The idea was to jockey the boats (there was a reverse, thank God) in and out of the surf zone in front of the reef to lower our jigs and hook up, then scoot back to play the fish in safety. With the motors at least we didn’t need a third hand to paddle and fish.

I was still rigging up when Steve hooked something heavy, hit reverse and scooted back toward me. I put down my rod and picked up the camera.

The ling (we could tell by its behavior) held straight down below the boat and shook its head. Our kayaks rocked wildly in the refracted waves. Steve gradually pumped it to the surface. I’d been taking pictures up till this point, then cued in and offered to help.

I glanced down through my Polarized lenses and could make out a hefty snake of a fish about a foot under the surface and getting bigger as it materialized beside my boat. I realized I hadn’t brought my net but I had a paddling glove on and a free hand and the impulse struck me. “I got it,” I told him.

Ling are living time bombs, lying deathly still until exploding into thrashing tooth-laden, mayhem. It lay calmly on its side, so I reached over and grabbed the wrist of the tail with one hand and the jig with the other. I lifted, swung, and set it smoothly onto my lap. Then the explosion!

I couldn’t think of anything better to do so I threw myself forward making a kind of ling sandwich, pressing it against my lap to subdue it. It was a bonehead idea; I could feel the hook sink into my leg. The swoop and grab was raptor-like, credit that, but the end game was not thought out. I couldn’t do anything hunched up like I was. I turned my head to the side and called over to Steve: “Little help.”

Steve was laughing hard. I should have used his net. I could always wait for it to die. If I was alone I might have done that.
“You should have used a net. Hang on, let me get a pic.”
I glared at him.
He swung the business end of his net over to me. I straightened up, quickly unhooked myself and dropped in the ling. It was a beautiful fish and I was grateful that it would be our dinner.

I built a little driftwood fire below the high tide line against a massive wall of granite at the far end of our tiny beach. I heated a big flat rock in the coals while Steve prepped the garlic, onions, greens and rice. We had a cooler here courtesy of the water taxi and it was like a raft trip in that regard.

I dragged the rock out of the fire, blew off the fine white ash, and slapped down two mint green fillets. Interesting how 20% of ling are green fleshed while others are white. Apparently it has something to do with a blood agent called biliverdin.

Thinking of green eggs and ham, I salted and peppered liberally and let it sizzle ten minutes a side and served up steaming hot. It would be our first of many fish dinners that week from a revolving menu of fish du jour.

The fire had winked out to glowing embers and I grabbed my headlamp and headed out to gather some driftwood. I found a hefty log and threw it on my shoulder and started back. It took only a few steps before I noticed how much heavier it seemed compared to only a couple of years before. I gritted my teeth and continued back to camp. I thought of Doba and the suffering remark and chuckled.

The water around the islands was filthy with fish, but at the same time, I was just about done fishing for sport. Ocean kayaking had taught me a lesson on living in the present and eating locally and my neo-predator was alive and well these days. I still loved to fish, loved the mystery and metaphor of seeking mysterious beings from another dimension, but I needed more of a meaningful context anymore, like eating what I caught and not torturing fish purely for the hell of it.

The salmon were in short supply. While they’re considered the pinnacle of a fishing experience up here, the concept of pinnacle doesn’t so much apply in a kayak on the open ocean. Just being out here is pinnacle enough.

Next down from Salmon for the table, at least, are lingcod. They’re similar to the tiny-mouthed kelp greenling that we catch frequently and in the same family, but with mouths like a kitchen sink and eighteen needle-sharp teeth. As I said, a table favorite but fishing for them in a kayak—landing one, at least—can be brutal.

We had an early brisk wind out of the north one day and decided to explore the tiny archipelago, paddling between the islands and making a brief stop on Chekalis Island to visit an older native woman I had met before. She was no longer there. I suspected she had moved into the village to live with family. We poked around the abandoned buildings where the salal was hungrily reclaiming its own. On the way back to camp we stopped and jigged up dinner.

Brilliant sunlight carried the day along with a gusty north wind coming along early that evening. I brought out a solar oven to broil our catch. While Steve filleted the fish, I prepped the onions and garlic and quartered red potatoes, then laid our salt and peppered fillets into a steel sleeve and slid them into a GoSun solar oven.

The mélange of delicious smells on the sea wind was exquisite and we nursed our growlers while we waited. Before long we were tucked into a tasty meal. We power up with solar energy at home and it was good to bring a little of that low-key tech along with us to do some cooking and charge our batteries.

One morning later in the week, I woke up to the sound of wind out of the southeast huffing in the trees surrounding camp. I stuck my head outside the tent door and looked out onto a steely gray sea flecked with white that stretched across the darkening horizon to the southeast.

Steve was up and we turned on the VHF to get the latest weather prediction from Environment Canada: Storm Force winds. I’d been on this very isle twenty years earlier when Hurricane Force winds blew through. We threw up a tarp shelter over a small, driftwood stockade to sit under and enjoy the atmospherics. Storm Force winds battered the island and bent the trees throughout the day but we managed to stay a step ahead of any damage. At the storm’s peak we retreated to a big dome tent, played cards and nipped from a bottle of whiskey.

It was the morning after the storm. Shafts of sunlight pierced a ragged grey cloud cover streaming onshore close overhead. The swell we could see to the north looked to be eight to twelve feet but running smooth as silk and it was windless on the water. It was our last day before Richard showed up to haul us out.

We loitered in camp a bit then suited up and motored out into the inlet to troll for salmon. The inlet is deep and wide and the outgoing tide was muddy from the storm rain. But after a while the current flipped from ebb to flood and we found greener water beneath our boats. We motored slowly up the inlet where I had found pods of hungry salmon in years past and had them chasing my fly across the surface as fast as I could strip it.

The surface was slick as glass as we headed back across the mouth of the inlet. By the middle of the inlet, we were in a swell carousel, bobbing high up in the air then dropping way, way down.

We packed up next morning, waded out Dunkirk style and said hello to Richard as we threw our bags of gear aboard, slid our boats over the aluminum gunnel and retraced our steps back to a lovely rustic lodge on Quadra Island, where the next day, in an unusual twist of fate, or perhaps a low-grade deus ex machina, we went out with a local guide and caught salmon hand over fist!

It felt good to clean up and dine on the patio deck of the Herriot Bay Inn the evening before a final round of fishing. We took showers and caught a Whitecap soccer game on the telly. We walked down to the inn and had dinner on the patio overlooking the water, then hiked back to our cabin and sat out on the deck in the dark to finish off the last big bottle of Arrowsmith beer we’d bought on the way north a week earlier.

I thought of Doba’s epic crossing and how utterly indulgent ours was by comparison. Water taxis and coolers, cots and electric kayaks, for Christ sake, but it was cool—suffering is relative and we had our share. Doba put a laser fine point on the ‘use it or lose it’ adage. It gets especially challenging the older we get, and where we once grabbed the boat on impulse and hit the water we now think twice, knowing full well the discomfort we’re in for. But that was Aleksander’s gift. Dude is older than 95% of us and not at all afraid to put his boat in the water.

As for the kayaks, we decided they were legit. You might not catch Doba in one but they had their niche. Having two hands free to fish and take pictures was epic and I’m a little embarrassed at how much I enjoyed the zoom. It seemed a bit like using a wheelchair before I needed one, but I got over it. I can see in my mind’s eye: a kayak pescadore leaving a SoCal marina in the early AM, sipping a chai latte in one hand and waving at his buddies with the other as he leaves them in his wake. Zoom zoom.

We looked out through the trees over the ferry landing leading to Cortez Island as the karaoke in the bar waxed loud on the wind. Life on Quadra Island was very much like life on Lopez Island at home. It had an old hippie element to it, the one where hippies went back to the land and found the traction they were looking for (or not). There were bedroom islander types sailing to Campbell River for work just like commuters in nearby Seattle, and there was the retired set. Then there are what our fishing guide, Sonny Boon (grinning like one himself) called the pirates laughing a har too loud on the bar patio below our cabin that night, down with the karaoke.

And I had noticed a smaller more disturbing element, a subset of the pirates (islandbillys one might call them) evidenced by a F*** Yoga sticker on the bumper of a car parked outside the bar. But then, there were many a roof rack filled with Kevlar, glass and plastic boats, too. Sea kayakers on their way to Desolation Sound or to ride the tidal bores that sluice the narrowly separated islands, or locals just out for a paddle and a pint before dinner. It was full on BC island life with predictable flair.

In the morning we would drive quiet roads in the predawn along with a bicycling newspaper boy, wandering deer, a small raccoon family and two young girls walking to the ferry. And we would fish all day with Sonny Boon and catch more salmon in six hours than I’ve caught in six years. Not so much for sport, mind, but to be thankful for and take home to eat over the long winter months.

Author’s Note: My friends and I began exploring Kyuquot sound and Checleset Bay before the Ecological Reserve was established in 1992. The protocol then was to check in with the band office in Kyuquot for permission to camp on First Nations territory and they were always gracious in welcoming us. When the Reserve was established, little information was made readily available about the new protocols or that certain First Nations Treaty Settlement land, including the Bunsby Islands, had been excluded. Kayakers today are encouraged to utilize Big Bunsby Marine Park (established in 2003) for a camping destination in the Bunsbys, or alternatively you can contact the Ka:’yu:‘k‘t’h’/Chek’tles7et’h’ First Nations, the KCFN Admin Office, for permission and details on what might be possible elsewhere:  250-332-5259